Debian Weekly News - January 25th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Marc Haber announced experimental packages of Exim4 linked against db4.2 for
later inclusion in to sarge/sid. OSNews has a guideline on using the
new debian-installer to install
Debian by Luis Lima.

Sarge Release Progress Update. Steve Langasek sent in
an update on the release progress for Debian 3.1. He reported that KDE
3.3 has been added to sarge and a porter upload for perl had taken place,
which dropped the release critical bug count about 60 bugs. He also
stated that progress on testing-proposed-updates and testing-security
has been made but is still waiting for infrastructure.

Status Update for volatile Archive. Andreas Barth reported about the status of debian-volatile. This unofficial archive aims at supporting fast moving
packages for the stable Debian release like spam filter, virus scanner and the like.
He and his team have set up the infrastructure and
mirrors for it.
The first package, whois has been accepted for debian-volatile's section of woody.

Renaming Binary Packages. Jay Berkenbilt wanted
to rename a package in order to lose the version in the package name. To
achieve this he planned to create a new source package and convert the old
packages into transitional packages only. Anthony Towns explained
that the name of a library package does not have to match its soname and believes
that no transitional packages need to be provided when Conflicts, Provides and
Replaces fields are carefully crafted.

Support for Devfs? Russell Coker stated
that devfs is regarded as obsolete in the kernel source and will be removed
in July 2005. However, the new installer is based on
it. Joey Hess asserted
that Debian will not destabilise the installer by beginning to make large changes
to it, like not using devfs, until sarge is released.

Changing the Architecture of a Package. Jay Berkenbilt wondered
if the change from any to all in a Debian package would
require manual intervention. Santiago Vila asserted
that such a package could enter the archive even faster, since it is built for
11 architectures "instantly".

Debian Women IRC meeting. The Debian Women group held an
IRC
meeting on January 16th. The topic discussed
was "How to best convey the purpose and goals of the Debian Women
project to those who have questions about it." Prior to the meeting, Jérémy
Bobbio raised the question of the best way to
organise and moderate IRC meetings, especially when non-native English
speakers are present. The meeting was well attended and provoked lively
discussions. Minutes were taken by
Colleen Hatfield.

Spurious Permissions Changes. Otto Wyss noticed
that permissions on a program he added the setuid flag were changed back
permanently. Peter Samuelson contributed
the proper dpkg-statoverride command and Maciej Dems added
that it would be better to use sudo in this case.

Depending on a particular Kernel Package. Martin Kittel wondered
if it is sensible to declare a dependency on a kernel image package since
arguments were raised in a former discussion
that not all users have the Debian kernel installed. Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
explained that the job of a dependency is to make sure that another
package is installed so its provided content can be used. The kernel is a
different case.

Mozilla Foundation Trademark Proposal. Gervase Markham
from the Mozilla Foundation proposed
a trademark agreement for Debian Firefox and Thunderbird packages. Walter
Landry pointed out that people outside of Debian would still be unable to legally
modify and redistribute the packages.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 4 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 242 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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